This alteration might be a barrier to the landscape structure and changes or might be a cause for the

progress of a new type of a habitat, needs to be measured to know more about the changes and the
factors causing these changes to the landscape.

To define landscape ecology as a whole, we can say that it studies the internal dynamics and
interaction of landscapes. The focus relies mainly on the spatial relationship of landscape elements
and ecosystems, functional and structural features of the land mosaic and change that has emerged
over time (Dramstad et al. 1995). Landscape ecology accentuates the interaction between spatial
pattern and ecological process, that is, the causes and consequences of spatial heterogeneity across a
range of scales (Turner et al. 2001). The discipline of Landscape Ecology is emerging as a driving force,
both in the domain of theoretical ecology and in applied fields (Sanderson and Harris 2000).

Landscape metrics are the primary tools to understand landscape structure and changes. We use
metrics – numeric data relating to the landscape pattern, through these tools. The input to these tools
calculating the metrics can be from satellites or maps developed for a specific application through
some GIS software, for example, ArcGIS. The input provided to the tool should be of a raster format
file or a.TIF file type. Tools like “FRAGSTATS” support a wide variety of input formats to be used with
their tool. Landscape metrics allow us to do an objective review of landscape structure.

Literature Review:

In the literature review, we will go through the metrics that are used in the landscape ecology
analysis from FRAGSTAT and other tools like LecoS etcetera that has made quantifying landscape
metrics possible. Also, we will go through a review of these tools and then further explain the features
they offer with respect to landscape metrics. The newly proposed tool for landscape metrics is
inspired by “FRAGSTATS” although the tool would address some of the issues present with
FRAGSTATS and also provide additional features and ease of using it as a plug-in with a popular GIS
software. Fragstats has released the newer version of the tool 4.0. They were originally developed
before 1982 and has evolved to version 4.0 covering gradient landscape metrics as well (McGarigal
and Marks 1995). Landscape ecology is about focusing on spatial patterns of the landscape elements
which calls for these tools to quantitatively analyze and provide with metrics for computation and
analysis. They are founded on patterns of environment that influence the ecological patterns. The
pattern of the ecological system can be considered to be a fractal that needs to be analyzed as to
how it directly or indirectly influences or corresponds to habitats.

The habitats are in which the organisms live, for example are structured spatially at a number of
scales. These patterns interact with the organism awareness and conduct to drive a higher level of the
process of population dynamics and behavior. If there is any kind of disturbance in the landscape
pattern interfere with the maintenance of biodiversity of the habitat and ecological health.

Therefore, the idea of quantifying landscapes came to be of much importance in learning the
pattern-process relationships (O’Neill et al. 1988, Turner 1990, Turner and Gardner 1991, Baker and
Cai 1992, McGarigal and Marks 1995). This kind of pattern-based study has already resulted in a lot of
indices for the landscape analysis patterns. These pattern-based development study has been made
possible with the advent of GIS technologies.
 There are many different interpretations of the term “landscape” itself. The landscapes usually
include an area of land with a mosaic of patches or landscape elements. As per Formal and Gordon
(1986) defines landscape as a cluster of interacting ecosystems repeated in a similar pattern
throughout the landscape area that is a part of the landscape ecology.

An example of the landscape pattern which is relevant to the area of the study can be considered
could be a wildlife habitat, we can see the landscape as a mosaic of habitat patches. These habitat
patches could be studied with respect to an organism’s perspective and the scaling of the
environment (Forman and Godron,1986).

These habitat patches can be defined with respect to an organism’s perspective and these
landscape sizes would differ as well based on the organism under study. These landscapes occupy
some spatial scale. The size of the habitat landscape cannot be defined in a particular fashion. Since
the size of the landscapes varies with respect to the organisms, we can’t have any definite definition
of the size of the landscape.

The landscape pattern can be classified in different ways depending on the data that is collected, and
the objectives of the types of data collection, there can be four types of spatial data as per (McGarigal
and Marks, 1995). The four types of landscape patterns are defined below:

1. Spatial point patterns:

These point patterns represent a group of units where the geographical locations are of primary
interest rather than a quantitative or qualitative attribute of the entity. Such kind of spatial point data
analysis are more clustered than expected by chance to find the spatial scale where it is more or less
clustered than expected by chance (Dale 1999, Greig-smith 1983)

2. Linear network patterns:

As the name suggests, this is a network of landscape elements which intersect to form a network.
An example of this kind of network patterns is a map of streams wherein the data consists of nodes or
linkages. With respect to the point patterns, the geographic location, nodes, and corridors are the
primary area of interest. The whole goal of the linear network pattern analysis is that they are used to
describe the physical structure (e.g., corridor density, mesh size, network connectivity, and circuitry) of
the network and there has been a variety of metrics developed for the purpose (Forman 1995,
McGarigal and Marks, 1995).

3. Surface patterns:

These are quantitative measurements which vary continuously across the landscape without any
explicit boundaries making the data look like representing a three-dimensional surface where the
value measured at a geographic surface is represented as a height of the surface. Here we look at the
sample and figure out how close they are together and how they are arranged closely with other with
respect to the measured variable (McGarigal and Marks, 1995).

4. Categorical map patterns:

 Here in this kind of landscape pattern, the data is represented as a mosaic of discrete patches
representing a relatively discrete area of relatively homogeneous environmental conditions at a
particular scale. These patch boundaries are shown and distinguished by discontinuities in
environmental character from surroundings that are relevant to the ecological phenomenon under
consideration (Wiens 1976, Kotliar and Wiens 1990).

There are certain metrics that are important in the study of the metrics for landscape analysis and the
data available. Patch level metrics form the basic building blocks for categorical maps.

Cell level metrics

There can be cell-level metrics which can be defined for individual cells. They can be used to
characterize the neighborhood of each of the cell without any regard for a patch or class affiliation.
An example can be an individual organism dispersing from natural habitat to a neighborhood defined
by a dispersal distance (McGarigal and Marks, 1995). This would make the typical output to consist of
a vector of cell-based measurements in tabular form along with a raster file which will give us an
interpretation of the values in the tabulation. The cell metrics can be used for computing for each of
the cells in the landscape and the output for the same would consist of a continuous surface grid or
map.